AMA: Atlassian Head of Product, Enterprise Agility, Natalia Baryshnikova on Product Management Career Path

Check out my other answer in the AMA outlining the difference in skills between different PM levels. As for how do I know that someone is ready to take on a Sr. PM role, the answer is I can see them operating with a mastery of skills that I expect from a senior product manager, while their title may still not have a Sr. in it. Best folks always uplevel themselves a little faster than the title, because if you are a growth mindset person who always likes to learn, you will most likely outpace you ...Read More

Best product management candidates craft compelling, concise and inspirational narratives when they interview. They demonstrate clarity of thinking, knowing both the facts and the "why" behind their answers, and genuine curiosity. I always walk out of an interview with a great product manager feeling like I have learned something valuable, and inspired. I spoke to the skills I've seen among successful product managers in another answer to the AMA, but if you are looking to impress hiring manager ...Read More

The most concise way I've described the difference between being an IC and a manager to someone was: "As an individual contributor, you need to get sh*t done. As a manager, you need to make sh*t happen". I have covered the specific skills need for both senior PMs and Directors in another answer to this AMA, but the most important difference between a senior PM and a people manager PM is that the former needs to excel at being a good PM themselves, and the latter is evaluated on how good their te ...Read More

As a general manager, I own specific business goals and outcomes that I need to achieve, and am responsible for on an organization level. Those goals are very specific and measurable, so I always know where I stand on them. As a team leader, I measure success through my team's happiness, proficiency, ability to grow their careers, and our ability to scale the team (e.g. we can quickly and effectively onboard new team members and set them up for success). As a product manager, I tie my own evalua ...Read More

Thank you for asking. Here is my answer to that from an earlier Sharebird AMA: https://sharebird.com/h/product-management/q/what-do-you-see-as-the-most-important-hardsoft-skills-to-be-a-successful-product-management-professional?answer=BPd1U65Lna One thing I would add to that answer is that hard vs. soft skills is not a dichotomy I personally use. There is a "hard" and a "soft" side to every skill. For example, being "analytical" as a skill does not only require a sheer ability to reason and use ...Read More

My personal acronym for the skills that make product managers succesfull is H.A.C.K. H for Humility. There are two particularly important benefits of humility. First, humble people better navigate the emotional roller coaster of being wrong and having to admit it. They quickly recover from situations where their ego might have gotten hurt and move on to the next experiment or iteration. Product managers make a lot of decisions and the ability to course correct quickly without dwelling produces a ...Read More

A common pitfall that slows teams down is inability to make good decisions quickly, especially if these decisions involve many stakeholders. One of the best-kept team velocity secrets, especially in larger organizations, is having a consistent and efficient decision-making framework that is practiced across teams. With a small initial upfront investment of agreeing on a decision making framework within your organization (or just starting to practice it consistently), you will be able to save man ...Read More

Let's take a look at common milestones of a product management career, and which skills you need the most on each level. This not an exhaustive list, but you can see the trends of how the skillset evolves.  Individual contributor (IC) PM: Prioritization, trade-offs, taste (sense for what makes a good user/developer/API experience), empathy for users/stakeholders/engineers/designers, knowing how to develop and test a hypothesis, grasp of success and guardrail metrics, growth mindset (ability to c ...Read More

Your ability to create value quickly will depend on how quickly you can identify the problems and gaps in ways your organization operates today, and demonstrate progress towrds fixing them. Here's how you can do that: When you join an organization, schedule introductory 1-1s with a wide variety of stakeholders in your first couple weeks, and ask everyone about what problems they wish they'd see fixed. After 10+ conversations, you'll see clear patterns. Identify 1-3 small improvements (low hangin ...Read More

Your path to landing a product role will depend on being able to show how your skills from the current role translate to the new world, and proving that you can bring value to a product team on Day 1 when you join. Here is how I would tackle this: Identify the similarities between product manager skills and yours - there are planty of parallels between building software and construction. Scan through job postings, listen to recorded interviews of PM and start identifying which skills of yours an ...Read More